In a recent story in the New York Times with the headline “Lawsuits Touch Off Debate Over Paddling in the Schools,” I read of children in Zwolle, La., who felt the sting of the paddle and whose parents were now suing. The item brought back some unwelcome memories. Even as a 50-year-old university professor, I could not suppress the anger that welled up inside me reading about something I had wrongly assumed was a relic of the past — my past.
Twenty-three states, most of them in the South, still allow corporal punishment. The most recent data indicates that some 365,000 students are paddled each year. But I have no wish to write about numbers. It is about one individual child I write and of the invisible scars that paddling leaves behind.
In 1956, I was a first-grader at Belle Stone Elementary School in Canton, Ohio. I was 7 years old. I stood 4 feet tall and weighed all of 52 pounds. I was basically a good kid. Like many back then, I said “Yes, Sir,” and “No, Ma’am,” when addressed by adults. Teachers brought out in me an equal mixture of respect and fear. The fear would soon overtake the respect.
After reading about the Louisiana lawsuit, I decided to dig out my first grade report card. It was divided into two sections. The first was called “Scholarship,” and recorded that I had a mix of B’s and C’s. The second section was dedicated to “Citizenship.” And there, under “Thinks and Works Well Alone,” were two check marks — a record of the charges against me. I had been whispering with my friend Billy Rosenthal in the back of class while the teacher, Mrs. P, was talking.
Mrs. P was a large and stern woman who glowered at anyone who did not pay strict attention or who did not sit perfectly still. I was a squirmer. So was Billy. What I remember is this: One day in that first year of school, I was hauled out of class by the scruff of my neck and told to put my hands against the cold ceramic tiles of the wall. Then I was told to spread my feet apart and bend over. In her strong hands, Mrs. P held a 3-foot-long oak paddle with Greek letters on it — a memento of a college fraternity. That paddle had long hung by a leather thong just outside the principal’s office — a warning to one and all, a symbol of authority, like a Roman fasces.
“I am doing this because I care about you,” Mrs. P told me, wrapping the leather thong around the wrist of her right hand. An instant later, I felt the wood slam against my buttocks. I lurched forward into the wall, stiffening my arms to absorb the shock. The crack of the paddle resounded down the hall. I imagine there was not a soul in that school who did not hear it and wince. In later years I associated it with the dimming of the lights when an executioner throws the switch on the electric chair.
Other students and teachers walked by and gawked. I neither cried nor flinched. I took my punishment as I was told I must — “like a man.” I received half a dozen whacks. I remember limping home over the hill, Mrs. P’s words still in my ears: “I am doing this because I care about you.” I was thinking, “I wish she didn’t care so much.”
At home I inspected the damage in the privacy of my bedroom. There were red welts on both cheeks. I never said a word to my parents. After that paddling I did not whisper in class again. In fact, I did not speak in class at all. Mostly I tried to be invisible and in this, at least, I succeeded. After the first grade, I was never again paddled, though the threat of it was as much a part of every school day as the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. Scarcely a week went by when the crack of the paddle did not fill the halls.
In the years after, I became a journalist and a teacher. But those few moments in the hallway came to be a defining memory not only of my first year in school but of childhood itself. That early introduction to fear and humiliation was what I remembered first and last. And when I had my own two sons and I felt my hand rise in anger, I remembered again the paddle. Almost always my hand froze in midair. When it did not I was filled with remorse.
Until reading recent news accounts I had thought that mine was the last generation whose elders believed that to “spare the rod” was to “spoil the child.” In the intervening years I rarely thought about the paddle. The lesson was ineffective but searing. If it was intended to prove that reason has its limits or that force can legitimately be wielded against even the most vulnerable among us, then it failed utterly. It was a kind of branding iron that marked me for public scorn and private shame.
That such a punishment should be sanctioned for children, long after the stocks, the pillory and cat-o’-nine-tails were banned as inhumane for adults, says something about our culture: It says that we are willing to resort to the primitive when it comes to the defenseless.
Never mind that virtually every industrialized nation except Canada, the U.S. and one state in Australia has outlawed paddling, or that New Jersey banned the practice 134 years ago. Texas, home of self-proclaimed education President George Bush, leads the nation in the number of kids struck each year: 85,000. And lawsuits like that in Louisiana seldom prevail, given the vague wording of state laws and the Supreme Court’s finding that such punishment is neither cruel nor unusual.
Some progress has been made. Twenty years ago in my home state of Ohio, the paddle was brought out 65,000 times. Last year it was used 600 times. And in a University of New Hampshire study, based on interviews with 800 mothers, researchers concluded that corporal punishment may curb immediate offending behavior but in the long run — four years out — it produced children who were decidedly more rebellious.
I can attest to that. As an adult, I suspect the experience helped engender my smoldering distrust of authority figures and institutions. I am sure that it molded my belief that a school, above all else, should be a sanctuary free of violence, a refuge where the only hand raised should be that of an eager student. It is one of the reasons I became a teacher, having been convinced that there was a better way.
Last year, for the first time in four decades, I returned to Belle Stone Elementary School. My escort was the new principal, Daninel J. Nero. Surprisingly little had changed. The tiles were still cold to the touch; the wrought iron banisters were the same, though the stone steps were worn a little smoother from so many decades of small feet in big hurries.
But what I remembered most as I walked down the long hallway past the door to Mrs. P’s class was neither the laughter nor the sense of wonder, but the echo of the paddle informing one and all of my punishment. I asked the principal if the paddle still hung on the office wall. He didn’t even know what I was talking about. And that is how it should be.
Last week, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote a column titled “The Thought Police” in which he described the case of an Ohio man sentenced to seven years in prison merely for “thinking bad thoughts about children and writing them down in his private journal.” Well, I have a story of my own.
It is a small story — too small to make the news, but part of something too large to be ignored. My story also takes place in Ohio, where I write and where I live.
It began when our family’s au pair, Sebastian Schmidt, set out from our home in Cleveland to visit friends in Detroit. He was traveling by Greyhound and had to change buses in Toledo, Ohio. And that was where it happened.
As he got off the bus in Toledo, weighed down by a huge green backpack, something fell from his hands. It was a sheaf of eight pages he had torn from a magazine to read on the long ride. He stooped down to gather up the fallen pages. As he stood up, he saw a policeman in a blue uniform standing over him.
The policeman, a patrolman, insisted that Sebastian show him the pages. Sebastian claims the officer was anything but friendly. It was Sebastian’s first encounter with an American policeman and he was nervous and afraid. He comes from a small town called Poessnik in what was once East Germany, a place where police were once truly to be feared.
The officer scanned the pages sternly and declared them to be pornographic. He had Sebastian open up his backpack to make sure that there were no more offending materials hidden within, but there was only his diary, his wallet and a copy of the New York Times.
Once more the officer scanned the offending pages, shaking his head ruefully. Sebastian offered the only two defenses that came to mind. First, he explained, he was a foreigner.
“I don’t know what the laws are in Germany,” responded the officer, “but here it is against the law to read such materials in public.”
Then Sebastian attempted to say that the materials were not pornographic, that they came from a serious magazine. They had been torn from the pages of Esquire magazine, from an article titled “How a Woman Ages.” There were no pictures of buttocks or breasts, although the woman featured in the photos did cover herself up with her arms in one or two of the black-and-white shots. (If anyone was a scofflaw, it was my wife, for the Esquire subscription was hers.) There was also, in the thin stack of pages, a book review from the New Yorker. Apparently this was deemed lawful material as the officer took no exception to it.
For Sebastian, it was a bewildering experience. He is 20 years old and while taking care of our two sons, he had studied photography at a local community college. They had not warned him there of the dangers of such photographs.
If Sebastian were seen reading such materials in public again, warned the officer, he would be arrested. After some 15 minutes, he went on about his business patrolling Toledo’s Greyhound bus station, while a shaken Sebastian sat down and tried to drown out his fears by listening to tapes on his Sony Walkman. (The officer did not ask him what tapes he was listening to.)
When Sebastian returned from his trip to Detroit three days later, he told this story to my wife and then to me. He had never been one to stretch the truth, but still I could not quite believe that things were precisely as he had said, so I called the Toledo bus station and spoke with the officer.
His name is Arrow Osborne. On the phone he was quite courteous, but he contradicted nothing Sebastian had told us. “That was material that was clearly borderline pornographic,” he told me. “I’m sure it’s acceptable in Germany, but it’s illegal here in the United States.”
Never in my three years of law school had I been introduced to the term “borderline pornographic.” It seems the law of the land with regard to pornography is indeed “knowing it when you see it.”
“It was a call that I made and I stand by it,” said Officer Osborne. “There were kids in the area. One of the pictures shows a girl covering up her breasts. It’s illegal to show pictures of breasts or buttocks. He had it out in the open and that makes it illegal.”
Apparently, this was not the first time such a thing had happened. “I stop people all the time,” said Officer Osborne, who explained that Greyhound encourages him to do so. I couldn’t help wondering how many other Officer Osbornes are out there protecting us from ourselves.
“Sexual hysteria has given the thought police the opening they’ve craved,” wrote Herbert in the Times. And here in Ohio, the thought police are in their glory these days.
On Sunday, we saw Sebastian off at the Cleveland airport, the first leg of his journey back to Berlin and then on to his home in Poessnik. I wondered if, when he changed planes at Dulles, he would be more careful about what he was seen to be reading. I shuddered to think what he would tell his friends and family in Germany about the America he found at a bus station in Toledo.
Some months ago I was just killing time, reading letters offered for sale on eBay.com, the online auction site. Some were penned by famous people — Nixon, Einstein, Proust — and commanded fabulous prices. But the letter that caught my eye was from a nobody to a nobody. It was handwritten and dated Oct. 5, 1918. It was from someone in the War Department and was addressed to one “Andrew E. Race, R.F.D. 1 Manchester Depot, Vermont.”
“Dear Sir,” it began, “It is with deep regret that I heard this morning of your son’s death. He put up a bully fight and it seemed until the very end that he must win. I merely write a line to let his father know that the son was a dandy little soldier and attracted the favorable notice of his officers from the first day that he arrived in camp.
“I know that I have lost a good soldier,” he went on, “and feel just as if I had lost a good friend. Every time I would see your son performing some duty I would … advance him for the willing and satisfactory manner in which he performed it. It’s a cruel shame and I’m mighty sorry.” The letter was signed “Charles J. Bellamy.” He was a captain at Camp Devens, Mass.
Something about the letter unnerved me. How could something so intensely personal as a letter about the death of a son find its way into e-commerce? I was troubled too by the utter anonymity of this soldier’s death. The deceased was not even named, though his identity was clear enough to the father in whose trembling hands this letter was once held. But that grief had long since been reduced to a mere archival curiosity. Less — a commodity on a Web site.
It seemed to me that a life, no matter how brief, ought to come to more than this. Who was the young man? What battle claimed him? Where was he buried? Did he leave behind a wife or children? Over the intervening 80 years all traces of his life had been expunged. He had now been consigned to the lowest rung of history, too obscure even to catch a legitimate antiquarian’s eye. The last remaining evidence of this young man’s tragedy was now the subject of a bidding war in cyberspace, to which I reluctantly added my own offer. The bidding began at a few dollars. Within days, the price had soared.
I became determined to win, though I had not the foggiest idea why. And in the end I did win. I scribbled off a check for $67.50 and waited for my prize.
The yellowing letter arrived a few days later by priority mail. It was still in the envelope from which a stricken father had sought comfort after his son’s death. I read it almost with a sense of shame, and tucked it away in a drawer where it remained for months, a strange trophy for which I had no discernible use and that made me feel like a ghoulish interloper. What had made me purchase another’s grief at auction?
I had all but forgotten about the letter until one day I came across it again and sat down to read it once more. I felt an irrepressible need to learn something about this young man, to know at least his name and the field in which he fell. As an investigative reporter, I fancied myself well equipped for the task. I telephoned Manchester, Vt., and spoke to the town clerk. I interviewed the caretakers of cemeteries. I queried a local historian. Everywhere I drew a blank.
It was an object lesson in mortality, one I already knew too well. My father had died 25 years earlier — at 50 — and already my memories of him were dimming. All that I have of him is a few tattered letters. I wondered if one day they too might find their way into the hands of a high bidder, someone oblivious to their true worth. So quickly life becomes artifact. In 80 years, all traces of a soul may be lost. Discouraged, and annoyed with my indulgence in purchasing the letter, I once again put it away.
But recently I again found myself poring over it, searching for clues as to the identity of the deceased. Once again I took to the phones. A kind librarian in Manchester searched local war records and found reference to a young man whose surname was “Race” and who had died on Oct. 4, 1918. His name was Waldo Andrew Race.
He was identified as soldier No. 2,722,703. He was with the 1st Company of the 1st Battalion, 155th Depot Brigade. Now I had a name to go with the letter. I learned that he was born in Bradford, Pa., and that he was single and a fine violinist. Why any of this should matter to me, I could not say, but it did. I pressed for more details.
From other records I discovered that Race was 23 when he enlisted, that he stood 5-foot-5 and had blue eyes and light hair. His complexion, too, was light. He had been assigned to Camp Devens and died there the day before the letter was written by his admiring captain.
He was not felled by a bullet but by the dreaded “Spanish Lady,” the influenza that ravaged America even as World War I was coming to an end. His military camp, Devens, was too close to Boston, an epicenter of the plague. Not that it mattered: The whole country was soon enough in its grip. His death in early October coincided precisely with the very darkest days of the pestilence that snatched some 600,000 Americans, far more than war itself had claimed.
I read the letter yet again. “He put up a bully fight and it seemed until the very end that he must win.” His heroism had displayed itself not against the Kaiser but against a virus. Records show that his father and mother were compensated for their loss; each received $15 every month for the rest of their lives. That apparently brought little solace to them. His obituary contained these words:
“The passing of a loved one is always full of grief but the death of this son of Mr. and Mrs. Race was particularly pathetic inasmuch as it was just seven weeks since their youngest son met his sudden death by being struck by a railroad train at the crossing near the station. The parents had been buoyed up by the hope that their son might be spared owing to his fine constitution but the long strain was too much for him.”
His remains were brought to the family home. There were no mourners beyond his immediate family. Because of the flood tide of new influenza cases, all public gatherings — schools, churches, even funerals — were prohibited by law. The Race house was filled with flowers from those who would have come in person had they been allowed.
There was nothing more I could learn about Race, except that he held the rank of corporal and that his grave is in Manchester Center Cemetery.
Over the years, the letter outlasted the family to whom it was mailed and finally came to rest at the bottom of a steamer trunk in a chilly attic just across the Vermont state line in New Hampshire. There, an enterprising fellow came upon it and saw at once its latent value. Now I, too, am belatedly coming to see its worth. In a curious way, it feels as though the letter was also addressed to me, that it held a personal invitation to which my own needs made me duty bound to respond. By my words now, his name is again, at least for the moment, in the thoughts of the living. That gives me some comfort.
Each June I spend a week in Vermont, fishing and teaching writing. This June I will also be paying a visit to the grave of someone I would like to have known a little better. His name is Waldo Andrew Race. Like all names, his is worth remembering.
the much-hyped movie “Contact” is aswirl in a peculiar mix of controversies. There is the issue of various CNN newsmen lending their familiar faces and voices to a work of science fiction. And the White House has cried foul at the “Forrest Gump”-like use of President Clinton, whose image was manipulated by a computer and spliced into the story.
But there is another more intriguing question implicit in the debate surrounding “Contact,” one that goes beyond the propriety of allowing anchors to be actors or the legal niceties of appropriating a presidential mug. “Contact” is a vivid illustration of just how far we have come in blurring the line between fantasy and fact, amusement and news, imagination and reality. If “Contact” stands for anything, it should be as a much-needed warning to get a grip on what is real and what is not.
In recent years, scriptwriters and studios have increasingly neglected story, opting instead to boost sagging plot lines with the indicia of reality — from the ever-more anatomically correct dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park” and “Lost World,” to the computer-enhanced tornadoes of “Twister.” The aim is to divert our attention away from deficiencies of plot and character, targeting instead a kind of ersatz credibility achieved through special effects or the bald importation of elements from the real world. At the same time, news-gathering organizations like CNN have embraced Hollywood storyboards to bolster their flagging audience.
Not so long ago, it was considered slightly bad form for a reporter, when he or she was on a particularly good story, to openly “think book.” Nowadays, the hidden thought is “think movie.” Studios have hired ex-journalists to scour the landscape and snare options on news stories and magazine pieces before they have even hit the light of print. A journalist friend of mine has a deal with a major studio giving it first right of refusal on his pieces — in advance of publication. Not long ago I sold a film treatment to Columbia Pictures based on a series of articles on government relocation plans in the event of nuclear war. The lure was irresistible. No wonder the cinematic is creeping onto the front page and the front page into the cinema.
Much of it has to do with that magical business word, “synergy.” ABC marries Disney and Time weds Warner in unholy unions of journalism and entertainment, enabling them to accomplish together what could not be achieved alone: the capturing of a truly mass audience. Thus CNN executives saw nothing wrong in allowing news-gatherers and presenters to lend their credibility to a movie that has very little to do with reality. It was, after all, a “family project” — to one and all. Meanwhile Time magazine editors use computers to turn a cover photo of O.J. Simpson into something darker and more sinister, not unlike a director adjusting the lighting on a movie set.
Once upon a time, the power of facts alone was enough to move people. That seems no longer to be the case. Now we engineer and enhance reality in a seamless middle ground where Hollywood fantasies devoid of story meet news programs’ rivetingly entertaining pieces of reportage that are woefully short on truth. The graphically re-enacted “true accounts” we witness on “America’s Most Wanted” are just a channel switch away from the cinema veriti visions of “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide.” Newsmagazines like “Turning Point” and “PrimeTime Live” are breathless with scripted excitement, while “The X-Files” cooly elaborates on what we already know to be the real truth “out there.”
What does it matter? So a presidential cameo gives credence to the notion of extraterrestrials. “We don’t seriously worry that most Americans think that the president has started having contact with little green people,” White House spokesman Mike McCurry assured us. But the vast majority of Americans believe that little green men exist. Half of them, according to a recent poll, believe, along with Special Agent Fox Mulder, that the government is covering up this particular “truth.” Forget for a moment that we’ve been fruitlessly beaming radio waves into deep space for the past 40 years without any response, or that astronomers believe the odds against other organic, intelligent life forms existing in the universe are, well, astronomical.
Not too many Americans know this. More of them are convinced of Oliver Stone’s version of the Kennedy assassination than the one provided by the Warren Commission. History as written by Hollywood studios has spawned a generation tormented by conspiracies.
As if bowing to the inevitable, universities — the supposed repository of rational learning — are teaching a new course. It is called “creative nonfiction,” a kind of transmogrification of what was once respectfully dubbed “literary journalism.” At its best, it grafts time-honored techniques of story-telling onto the reporter’s craft. But this new genre, not content with the knowable, now threatens to erode the distinction between the reporter’s art and art itself.
Where the facts do not suffice, the drama is insufficient or the story does not have a neat beginning, middle and end, then poetic license is invoked. Interior monologues proliferate and the subjects of stories become characters in morality plays. I have had students who are no longer embarrassed to ask the question, “Does is matter if it’s really true?” And I am left to wonder how much longer they will be able to recognize the line that separates what is and what is not.
At its core, the blurring of the line reflects a desperate search for audience by both the bearers of news and the tellers of stories. But there is a price to be paid for such an audience. It is credibility, no longer the ultimate coin of the realm, but a cheap token to be traded in for a bit part in a flick.
